Fiction Reviews
Robots: Past & Future Short Stories
(2025) foreword by Chris Beckett, Flame Tree Press, £20 / Can$40 / US$30, hrdbk, 430pp, ISBN 978-1-835-62292-6
This is another of Flame Tree’s chunky anthologies, offering an eclectic and thought-provoking mix of ‘classic’ and newer tales of robots, cyborgs and assorted adjacent entities. It consists of forty pieces in all, including three extracts from longer works (which I’ll come back to shortly) and a satirical but unnervingly prescient essay by George Eliot, ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’, taken from her 1879 experimental work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Curiously though, the stories are arranged in alphabetical order, rather than historically or thematically, but perhaps the editors felt that was appropriate given the diversity of both approach and content within the stories.
The collection begins with an oldie but goodie, from 1899 – Elizabeth Bellamy’s ‘Ely’s Automatic Housemaid’. This is basically a re-telling of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, in which the putative man of the house is cast as the apprentice, who decides to purchase a robot in order to help his wife with the household duties. Much hilarity (and mayhem) then ensues, until the wife, qua sorcerer, takes back control and restores the house to good order.
The extract from E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man, first published in 1923, also has its ‘lol’ moments, as a cyborg from the future suddenly appears in the middle of a village cricket match (and proves a regular Gary Sobers when it comes to scoring sixes but unfortunately then fails to grasp the meaning of ‘run’). The complete novel does go on to tackle some serious themes, however, such as gender inequality and, interestingly enough, is one of the first pieces of fiction to deploy the relativistic ‘block’ view of spacetime, in a time-travel setting.
But of course, where there are such artificial beings, there will always be, inevitably it seems, sex-bots. ‘Doll Parts’ by Marissa Yarrow, published here for the first time, makes a brutally blunt point about the transference of gender-based violence from bot to human, whereas C. L. Moore’s ‘No Woman Born’ from 1944, offers a more nuanced account of a cyborg as both an object of desire and desirous in its/her own right.
Far more creepy and unsettling is the extract from Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s, The Future Eve, originally published in 1880. Here the stereotypical scientific genius decides to help his patron by providing him with an artificial woman who, unlike the latter’s current amour, is able to appreciate Wagner and the Venus de Milo. Given the underlying misogyny I’m not sure quite what the point is of including this, even granted that the novel is known for popularizing the term ‘android’ (the science it draws on certainly doesn’t seem to have advanced that much beyond Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with its similar emphasis on electrical arcs and sparks). The chapters extracted from Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis (1925) likewise make for awkward reading but on other grounds, as, divorced from the broader context supplied by the rest of the book, the narrative comes across as all the more surreal and difficult to fathom.
In contrast, a number of the other stories adopt the machinic perspective, including the following, published here for the first time: Nathanael Stottlemyer’s touching and effective ‘K-375’ centres on a quarry-bot that is reprogrammed to take care of a colony’s young children as illness sweeps through the adult population. Similarly, the robot in ‘I’m Fine, Mom’ by Soumya Sundar Mukherjee, also turns out to be benevolent, although the person being cared for resides at the other end of the human lifespan. In Brian K. Lowe’s ‘Wills and Trust’, on the other hand, any poignancy is undercut by a sense of unease generated by the inherent master-servant relationship that is portrayed.
Alternatively, some of the contributions use the robot character’s operational rigidity to achieve a suitably chilling effect. The narrator in ‘Family Portrait’ by Abigail Kemske (published in 2024), is a modern version of the household bot, determined to be as useful as it can possibly be and help the humans in its charge by ‘upgrading’ them. The vending bot in Fritz Leiber’s resonant 1953 story, ‘A Bad Day for Sales’, on the other hand, is utterly oblivious to human needs, even in the midst of disaster. As useless as ‘Robie’ is, it still manages to comfort and help a small child, albeit inadvertently.
Thematically related to the above, but subtler in the telling, is another true classic, ‘I Sing The Body Electric’ by a certain R. Bradbury, which first appeared in 1969. It opens brilliantly with the lines ‘Grandma! I remember her birth’ and from there takes the reader on a richly imagined journey from cradle to (near) grave, ending on something of a disquieting note.
These are, of course, just a few highlights from a collection spanning almost one hundred and fifty years of writing on a topic that is here delineated in an appropriately permissive manner. Having said that, and despite the inclusion of the chapters from Metropolis, the overall emphasis is generally Anglo-American and personally I would have liked to have seen Stanislaw Lem represented, for example, perhaps with one of his brilliant Cyberiad tales. Nevertheless, there is, as the saying goes, something for everyone here and even the less memorable contributions are indicative of the possibilities that still remain to be explored.
(And for those who are interested in the relevant history, spanning not just popular literature but also films and TV shows, I would recommend Camestros Felapton’s web-based series, Robot Fabulas.)
Steven French
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